When Takashi Ogino arrived in Brno this season, he brought with him more than a remarkable career. He brought decades of discipline shaped in one of the world’s most demanding baseball environments.
After 16 seasons in Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball league, Ogino joined Draci Brno in 2026 and immediately showed his class. In the first weeks of the Czech Extraliga season, he ranked among the most consistent hitters, posting a .370 batting average and reaching base in nearly half of his plate appearances.
His performance reflects something deeply rooted in Japanese baseball culture: precision, repetition, and control.
But this story is not only about performance on the field. It is about what happens beneath the surface.
What 2,000 Swings Really Means
Behind every hit lies repetition. A lot of it.
Between April and May alone, Ogino is estimated to have made roughly 2,000 swings, combining training sessions, pre-game practice, and live game situations.
From a scientific perspective, this raises an important question:
How does a wooden structure behave under thousands of repeated high-impact loads?
Unlike metal or composite materials, wood is anisotropic. Its internal structure is complex, with fibers, growth rings, and natural variability. Repeated stress can lead to microdamage long before visible failure occurs.
Unless you can look inside.
To answer that question, Ogino kindly lent us one of his game bats, a Rawlings wooden model that had already gone through this intensive period.
The analysis took place in Tescan’s Micro‑CT laboratory in Belgium, using the UniTOM XL system, which is designed to accommodate large and dense samples without compromise.
Micro‑CT allows researchers to:
Visualize internal structures in 3D without cutting the sample
Detect microcracks and structural defects at an early stage
Evaluate material integrity after repeated stress exposure
In this case, the objective was straightforward: check whether thousands of swings had initiated any internal damage.
The Result: Precision Without Failure
The scans revealed something remarkable.
Despite intense and repeated mechanical loading:
No internal cracks were detected
No fracture initiation points were identified
The wood structure remained uniform and intact
From a materials science point of view, this is a powerful example of durability under cyclic loading.
It also highlights an important aspect of sports equipment performance. Reliability is not only about the moment of impact. It is about how the material behaves across thousands of cycles, each one contributing to cumulative stress.
Beyond Baseball: What This Demonstrates
While this story starts on a baseball field, the implications go far beyond sport.
The same Micro‑CT workflows used to analyze this bat are applied across research and industry:
Fatigue analysis in advanced materials and composites
Inspection of additively manufactured components
Porosity and defect analysis in metals, ceramics, and polymers
Failure investigation without damaging valuable or unique samples
Wood, in this case, becomes a relatable but scientifically relevant model of a structured material under repeated load.
The conclusion is clear: critical information is often hidden inside, and Micro‑CT makes it accessible.
From Japan to Brno: A Shared Focus on Precision
There is another layer to this story that goes beyond material science.
A Japanese athlete brings his expertise to Brno, applying years of training defined by consistency and attention to detail. At the same time, Tescan is entering a new phase as part of Shimadzu Corporation, a Japanese leader in analytical instrumentation.
This connection is not just symbolic.
It represents the combination of:
Japanese expertise in precision measurement and analytical science
Tescan’s strength in advanced imaging and 3D characterization
A shared commitment to reliability, quality, and continuous improvement
In both baseball and science, success is rarely about a single moment. It is about consistency across thousands of repetitions.
What started as a curiosity about a baseball bat evolved into a clear demonstration of capability.
A full-size object scanned without compromise
Internal structure analyzed in high resolution
Material integrity verified after intensive real-world use
And perhaps most importantly, it shows how science can connect unexpected domains.
From Tokyo to Brno.
From the baseball field to the CT lab.
2,000 swings later, the bat still holds. And now, we know exactly why.
Written by Jana Šilarová
Head of Marketing Department